Dennis Otsuji understands that visitors are sometimes confused when they visit the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park. One of the complaints we always get from people is there isn’t very much to see here,” said Otsuji, the president of the Friendship Garden’s board of directors. “Their visit is so short.”

When he encounters a perplexed patron, Otsuji explains that the garden is unique among Balboa Park institutions. It’s not an attraction, at least not in the conventional sense; it’s a place of contemplation. How long you spend there is up to you.

“I tell them the purpose of having a garden like this is for people to enjoy, to relax, to pass the day in a very refreshing way,” Otsuji said.

The garden’s essence won’t change in 2015, when Balboa Park celebrates the centennial of the landmark 1915 Panama-California Exposition, but there will be more of it. Although a portion of the garden’s ongoing expansion is scheduled to open as early as this month, in time for its Aug. 15 August Moon Gala, the completion of the 11.5-acre complex is targeted for the 2015 centennial.

The move into the canyon adjacent to the institution’s current 2.5-acre site allows for additional gardens within the larger garden, including a tea and herb garden, a camellia and azalea garden, and more cherry tree groves. The expansion will also accommodate a new administrative building, a 250-seat amphitheater and a pavilion to house the expanded programming the organization expects to present when the project is complete in 2015.

The pavilion, which will be constructed in the traditional Japanese style, is being underwritten by a $3 million grant from Kazuo Inamori, chairman emeritus of the Kyocera Corp. and Japan Airlines and founder of the Kyoto Prize.

“Dr. Inamori told us: ‘Here’s the goal I would like you to achieve: I would like you to have the pavilion done by the 100th anniversary in 2015, and we will hold one of the Kyoto Prize Symposium activities in that pavilion,’ ” said Otsuji. “So we have a huge commitment, and we will meet it.”

Special considerations

If the experience of a Japanese garden has a special, unstructured quality to it, so does the construction of a Japanese garden. Its traditions go back centuries, including the idea that the land determines many of the garden’s features.

“As you design and construct it, you really feel the land itself and the plant materials you place around,” Otsuji said. “It’s not something you put on a piece of paper and that’s what you are going to build. It’s something you kind of feel as you go along with the typography of the land.”

The city of San Diego, however, needed more than feelings in permitting and approving the garden designed by Takeo Uesugi, ﻿the Japanese-American landscape architect who is also responsible for the garden at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles and the Japanese garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino.